It's all about the video in the week's blog post. The lunge is one of the most sports specific and effective exercise we can perform.

Everybody does lunges on a daily basis whether you know it or not, it is an exercise that literally has thousands and thousands of variations and ways we can alter or tweak it to make it even more effective.

The video below gives you a load or different variations on the lunge, when I was taught to perform lunges as part of my personal training course I was taught to keep my knee in line with my toe and keep my back straight.

Well, as you can see in the video I do not listen to any of this as it is a load of rubbish. The main reason this is taught, is down to safety and not because it is the most effective way to perform a lunge. In reality, it might actually prevent you from getting the best out of your lunge training by not allowing you to fully activate the muscles around your hips and calves.

In sport and everyday life we are constantly breaking this rule as we twist, turn, jump, run and whatever else, so why do we only need to lunge in this way? Surely by not training our bodies to go into these positions we are opening ourselves up for injury. Right? The answer is we don't.

By adding tweaks and variety to our lunge program, we can target more muscles, integrate our abs into the movement a lot more and be very specific with the muscles we want to focus on, while better preparing our bodies for the demands of sport and every day life.

In the video below I show you a load of ways to tweak a standard forward lunge, there are loads more however and you can also perform these variations lunging in any direction (forwards, backwards or diagonally).